IT Essentials: Wherefore art thou, AI?

Amazing how far you can extend a metaphor

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In this context, imagine Romeo as some sort of cyborg

AI is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.

In Act 2 of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the doomed Capulet heroine wanders around her bedroom thinking only of her absent love (whom, remember, she met approximately five minutes ago).

“Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” she asks - and, surprise, he was lurking under her balcony all along, just waiting for an appropriately dramatic moment to show himself.

Research we released this week shows a similar situation in tech: generative AI, all anyone wants to talk about right now, seems to be simultaneously absent but also everywhere, just waiting for the right moment.

Only about 15% of IT leaders say they’re using gen AI today, with a further 17% trialling and 37% “looking into it.” When AI's balcony reveal comes, it will be swift.

And what’s in a name? Capulet or Montague, Copilot or Claude, Gemini or Gemma, they all do much the same thing and come from the same place. In AI’s case, that’s Big Tech, and half of respondents thought AI would centralise more power into the hands of tech giants – up from 45% when we asked the same question in February.

It’s not all going their way, though. Vendors like Amazon and Microsoft, who are ploughing absolutely massive amounts of money into AI, are concerned about model collapse, when AI models degrade into uselessness because they’re being trained on their own outputs.

On the other hand, AI sceptics are worried about the possibility of the singularity, the point of no return for humanity’s reliance on machines. Some believe that could even come this decade.

Romeo and Juliet, of course, ends with both protagonists dying, which is something we should probably try to avoid.

Make sure you read John Leonard's excellent research discussed above, as well as his interview with 3M's Paul Cardno into how the manufacturing behemoth is using AI (taking a very sensible, "We only use it for problems we can't solve any other way" approach).

We're also approaching the end of the year with our annual celebration of the outstanding women in UK tech. This week we've released our list of the top 50 women in the industry and hosted our Women in Tech Excellence Awards. Our expert judges whittled down almost 1,900 entries into just 30 worthy winners.